Zendegi

by Greg Egan

Martin Seymour is a journalist, sent to Iran to cover the 2012 parliamentary elections. Nasim Golestani, a young Iranian scientist, lives in exile in the United States. She is hoping to be part of the Human Connectome Project, which will work to construct a detailed map of the wiring of the human brain. When government funding for the project is cancelled, she gets the chance to return to Iran and help rebuild her homeland.

Fifteen years later, Martin has made Iran his home, marrying and raising a family there, while Nasim is in charge of Zendegi, a virtual world used by millions for entertainment and business. She's enviously watching her former colleagues—while the Human Connectome Project is finally taking off, Zendegi is losing ground to bigger, brasher and better financed rivals, until Nasim realises she has the tools to make Zendegi unique.

Then tragedy strikes Martin's family, and he turns to Nasim, and Zendegi, seeking a solution that no one else can offer. But Zendegi is about to become a battlefield...

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Short Stories, Speculative Fiction, Near Future, Hard Science Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy

360 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 2010

About the author

Greg Egan specialises in hard science fiction stories with mathematical and quantum ontology themes, including the nature of consciousness. Other themes include genetics, simulated reality, posthumanism, mind transfer, sexuality, artificial intelligence, and the superiority of rational naturalism over religion.

He is a Hugo Award winner (and has been shortlisted for the Hugos three other times), and has also won the John W Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel. Some of his earlier short stories feature strong elements of supernatural horror, while due to his more popular science fiction he is known within the genre for his tendency to deal with complex and highly technical material (including inventive new physics and epistemology) in an unapologetically thorough manner.

Egan is a famously reclusive author when it comes to public appearances, he doesn't attend science fiction conventions, doesn't sign books and there are no photos available of him on the web.

Excerpted from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Glenn Russell]

Busy street in Tehran, Iran

Mind-mapping, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, personal identity - four pivotal themes running through this captivating Greg Egan novel set mostly in the bustling metropolis of 2027 Tehran, where the country of Iran is now a democracy.

If you are new to Greg Egan, then Zendegi is the perfect place to start - for one very good reason: his vintage hard science elements are contained within the broader context of a work that could be judged literary fiction; in point of fact, most of the hard science doesn't kick in until the last third of the novel and by that time even a non-science type like myself will have no difficulty grasping the author's technological and scientific ideas.

Zendegi is split into two parts: in shorter Part One we meet Australian journalist Martin Seymour, age 44, who has traveled to Iran in 2012 to follow the country's tumultuous political developments. Meanwhile, having fled Iran with her mother in the aftermath of her father's execution as a political dissident, 25-year-old Nasim Golestani conducts research at MIT that employs innovative electronic technology to map human consciousness. The story pops back and forth between the unfolding dramas of Martin and Nasim so by the end of this section of the novel, a reader possesses an intimate acquaintance of both as fully drawn characters.

In Part Two, the bulk of the story, one is given a clear picture of Tehran in 2027-2028, a dynamic, vibrant city in the throes of social and cultural change, a city where religion and moral traditions meet global technology and popular culture.

Much has changed in these past fifteen years. Martin owns a bookstore and is married to sweet, loving Mahnoosh, an Iranian woman, and is father to 7-year- old son, Javeed. Nasim has returned to Iran and is applying her off the charts computer skills and mind-mapping expertise working for Zendegi, a highly successful international company creating virtual reality programs that have captured the public imagination.

Greg Egan beautifully portrays the men and women living their lives in this future Iran. So as not to spoil and reveal too many details revolving around plot, I'll make a quick shift and throw the spotlight on a number of hard SF components of the tale:

Zounds! Super-Technology – As a way of connecting with son Javeed, Martin enters the world of virtual reality offered by the new program that’s all the rage among youngsters from Tehran to Tokyo: Zendegi. Martin can hardly believe it. It’s all so real. Martin and Javeed travel to grassy fields at the edge of a forest and encounter boys running from a winged tiger before wending their way through a giant maze. Over the next weeks their further adventures include interacting with inhabitants of the ancient city Kabul and entering the world of a famous Persian fairy tale.

Side-loading – Nasim is a key creator behind the ability to “side-load,” the term used for brain-mapping a real person to create that individual’s “Proxy” to be used in the company’s virtual reality programs. For example: Ashkan Azimi, captain of the Iranian national soccer team, rests inside an MRI machine and imagines playing soccer matches. Nasim, via mind-mapping technology, records his unique moves and translates them into sophisticated computer language so that when game-players enter Zendegi they can play on the same soccer team as their hero. Mind-blowing, for sure. Please keep in mind this is Greg Egan science fiction and years in the future.

Immortality –Back when she was at MIT, Nate Caplan tells Nasim he’s in perfect mental and physical health and his IQ is 160. Caplan wants to be the prime candidate for a program that will extend the life of an individual. And his possesses millions of dollars to back up his request. Caplan makes his presence felt during the years Nasim is in Tehran. When Nasim and Caplan exchange ideas, sit up and take notice: this is a prime time for Greg Egan to sharpen his reflections on the challenges surrounding our future ventures into the realms of artificial intelligence and virtual reality.

Turning Point - Martin, age 60, is diagnosed with terminal cancer. The novel takes a wild and decidedly personal turn when Martin informs Nasim: "I want you to make a Proxy of me that can live in Zendegi and help raise my son."

Opposition, One – As expected, Nasim and others within the company must deal with those who have serious issues with Zendegi’s messing around with personal identity, artificial intelligence and virtual reality. One organization goes so far as to hack into Zendegi in order to force a number of concessions. In discussion with Nasim, as part of his argument, an organization representative declares: “So you’re happy with your games modules; your conscience is clear. Fine. But do you really think it will stop there? If there is no law, if there is no line drawn, what makes you so sure that it’s not going to end with software that even you’d call conscious?”

Opposition, Two - Also as expected, conservative religious leaders and their followers are less than enthusiastic about Zendegi catching on like wild fire, especially among Islamic youth. Placards read: OUR SOULS ARE NOT FOR THESE MACHINES. Objections even reach the point of accusations of blasphemy.

Opposition, Three - Nasim and Zendegi even have to deal with the fallout when an distant organization like The Superintelligence Project states that God is coming into existence since they are building Him. Ahhh! The questions that crop up!

Zendegi is both a very human, heartfelt tale and one prompting an entire range of ethical and philosophic considerations. Count me in as a new Greg Egan fan. More reviews of his books to follow.


Australian author Greg Egan, born 1961 - Greg takes pride in not having any photos of himself available on the web. Since I plan to review a string of his novels, this photo is the way I picture the outstanding SF novelist writing at his computer.

"Side-loading," Caplan replied, "is the process of training a neural network to mimic a particular organic brain based on a rich set of non-intrusive scans of the brain in action. It's midway between the extremes: in classic uploading, you look at the brain's anatomy in microscopic detail and try to reproduce everything from that, whereas in classic neural-network training, what's available to you is just stimulus and response: sensory imput and visible behavior, with the brain as a black box. In side-loading, you get to peer inside the box, even if you don't get to take it apart." - Greg Egan, Zendegi

[Claudia · Rating 3 out of 5]

A short story about a mysterious zeitgeber which affected a fifth of the total population, and the implications about their psychology, emotions and social life, as well as of all the others involved.

The open ending leaves room for thoughts, however, I was not particularly engaged by neither of the characters, nor their struggles. Still, a nice story, and, as usual with Egan, an interesting idea to extrapolate upon.

Can be read online at Tor.com: https://www.tor.com/2019/09/25/zeitge...

[Alina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll also put the name of the story here, in case Goodreads decides to merge it into some other work...
Zeitgeber by Greg Egan - 4/5★

A story about what happens when one’s internal biological clock is out of sync with zeitgeber (external cues like light/sunlight, sleeping/eating patterns), can the world continue functioning if everyone has their own circadian/biological rhythms.

The short story is found in Some of the Best from Tor.com, 2019 edition and can also be read on Tor.com.

[Ajeje Brazov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Viviamo da sempre con dei ritmi circadiani prestabiliti, che ci fanno svegliare la mattina e ci fanno addormentare la notte, cioè assecondando il sorgere ed il tramontare del Sole.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZUeK...

Ma se un bel giorno, una buona fetta della popolazione mondiale, smettesse di assencondare questo ciclo e si mettesse a seguire un proprio, privato ritmo di veglia e di sonno, cosa succederebbe alle relazioni sociali, al lavoro, alla scuola ecc... a tutto ciò che è la società?

[Abolfazl Nasri · Rating 3 out of 5]

گرگ ایگان در کتاب زندگی، بیش از هر چیز به ایده وفادار است، نه به روایتِ کلاسیک یا درگیرکردن عاطفی مخاطب. داستان در لایه‌ ظاهری، حول تلاقی چند خط روایی می‌چرخد: یک روزنامه‌نگار استرالیایی در ایرانِ سال 1390، اعتراضاتی که به روی کار آمدن رئیس‌جمهور سکولار منجر می‌شود، یک پروژه‌ علمی عظیم برای نقشه‌برداری کامل از مغز انسان و گروهی از آدم‌ها که هرکدام به شکلی با فناوری، هویت و آینده‌ی بشر گره خورده‌اند. این خطوط به‌تدریج به هم نزدیک می‌شوند، اما نه به شکل انفجاری یا دراماتیک؛ بلکه بیشتر شبیه اتصال سرد و محاسبه‌شده‌ چند مدار فکری. نویسنده با وسواس علمی همیشگی‌اش، جزئیات فنی را جدی می‌گیرد و جهان داستان را بر پایه‌ی فرض‌هایی بنا می‌کند که از نظر نظری قابل دفاع‌اند. این دقت، برای خواننده‌ای که به علمی‌تخیلی سخت علاقه‌مند است، نقطه‌ی قوت مهمی محسوب می‌شود.
اما همین‌جا، مهم‌ترین ضعف کتاب هم خودش را نشان می‌دهد. روایت، اغلب زیر بار توضیح و تحلیل فنی له می‌شود. شخصیت‌ها بیشتر حامل ایده هستند تا انسان‌هایی با کشمکش درونی عمیق. تصمیم‌هایشان قابل فهم است، اما الزاماً همذات‌پندارانه نیست. به‌خصوص در بخش‌هایی که به پروژه‌های علمی و آینده‌ ذهن دیجیتال پرداخته می‌شود، داستان حالتی شبیه مقاله‌ تفسیری پیدا می‌کند؛ جذاب از نظر فکری، اما خشک از نظر روایی.
بعد سیاسی و اجتماعی داستان، به‌ویژه روایت ایران و فضای سرکوب، ریاکاری و مقاومت پراکنده، از نظر اتمسفر قابل توجه است و نسبت به بسیاری از آثار علمی‌تخیلی غربی، جزئی‌نگرتر و کمتر کلیشه‌ای عمل می‌کند. با این حال، این بخش هم بیشتر نقش زمینه را دارد تا موتور اصلی داستان. نویسنده علاقه‌ای به قهرمان‌سازی یا اوج‌گیری احساسی ندارد و ترجیح می‌دهد همه‌چیز در سطحی کنترل‌شده و سرد باقی بماند.
در نهایت، این کتاب اثری است که احترام برمی‌انگیزد، اما الزاماً شیفتگی نه. ایده‌های بزرگ دارد، سؤال‌های مهمی مطرح می‌کند و از نظر فکری چالش‌برانگیز است، اما در تبدیل این ایده‌ها به تجربه‌ای عاطفی، ماندگار و روایی، به تمام ظرفیت خود نمی‌رسد. برای خواننده‌ای که دنبال علمی‌تخیلی اندیشه‌محور است، تجربه‌ای ارزشمند اما نه درخشان خواهد بود.
چند تا نکته دیگر هم در داستان وجود داشت که باید به آن‌ها اشاره کنم. مثلاً پرداخت به داستان‌های شاهنامه خیلی جذاب بود، اما تا حد زیادی حاشیه‌ای به نظر می‌رسید. از طرف دیگر، نویسنده شناخت کافی از زبان فارسی و فرهنگ ایران نداشت که در مورد زبان خود نویسنده به موضوع اشاره کرده. مثلاً انتخاب اسم عمر برای یکی از شخصیت‌های اصلی کتاب که یک تهرانی فارس و شیعه است و تمایلات کم‌وبیش نژادپرستانه دارد، یک بی‌سلیقگی کامل و یک ناآگاهی مطلق محسوب می‌شود.

[Mitticus · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 wake up stars

Quite interesting story about how the changed cycle of sleep in the population could affect many things. Family, school, jobs. How you will be dealing with that?

A father have to live with his six year daughter in another horary, and later many more join them.

Emma said, “Before, it didn’t matter if it was day or night; we had our own sun inside us, and when it was up, it was brighter than the old one. Now you want us to pretend we don’t see it anymore.”

The relationship between the father and his daughter is strong and sweet.

Give it a try.

Online:
https://www.tor.com/2019/09/25/zeitge...

-----------------------------------------------------
Historia corta por ahora en Tor.

Un apdre descubre a su hijad espierta y jugando a las 3 de la mañana, lo que parece una cosa menor pronto se convierte en un dolor de cabeza en muchas instancias.

Me resultó muy interesante esto de que un quinto de la poblacion de repente tiene un desplazamiento horario interno, circadiano, y despiertan en medio de la noche, mientras que otros se caen de sueño en medio del trabajo. Esto afecta a cualquier edad y condición social, es una epidemia no tradicional.

Siempre he tenido problemas para dormir de noche. Esto me generó siempre bromas de ser 'vampiro', y aunque creo que pasé la básica casi sin asistir a la escuela, después a fuerza tuve que regularizar mi ciclo. Aunque sigo con el mismo problema ahora :/

[Erik · Rating 3 out of 5]

Zendegi is the book equivalent of Michael Jordan quitting basketball to play AA baseball. It’s not that MJ was bad at baseball. It’s just that he was extraordinary at basketball.

Greg Egan is my favorite science fiction author. No other author I’ve read comes anywhere close to his ability to explore fabulous science ideas at their utmost imaginative limits while retaining a sense of plausibility. In my Diaspora review, I wrote: “Reading it brought into my mind a sense of wonder and of sheer visceral infinity that I hadn’t felt for years.” In my Schild’s Ladder review, I wrote: “An Egan work is an exceedingly rare, utterly beautiful combination of a child’s wonder and a scientist’s rigor.”

Unfortunately, I can’t write anything like that about Zendegi.

Instead of exploring grand sci-fi ideas, Zendegi tells the near-future stories of an Iranian programmer/scientist and an Australian ex-pat journalist in Iran. The first half of the story is largely about Iranian history & politics (viva la شورش!), which I found interesting enough. But it almost entirely lacks any sci-fi elements. It’s only in the second half that we get some sci-fi, in particular the titular Zendegi, a VR platform, and the Iranian programmer’s attempts to map the human brain to create more human AI.

Zendegi also contains a strong flavor of Futurism (see Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near), and Egan adopts a fairly critical tone towards those elements. These are the type of people who go on calorie restrictive diets and hack their own genes in order to extend their lives long enough to take part in what they believe is an imminent immortality, brought on by a boot-strapped Artificial Super-Intelligence. I don’t share such optimism myself, but I do admire them for it. It was nice to see a Futurist character, which I don't think I've ever come across before.

Compared to Egan’s other novels, Zendegi is much more character-centric, with family and political conflict given equal ink as the (for me, at least) more interesting ethical and technological conflicts.

It’s not that Zendegi is a bad book. It has its flaws, in particular a wildly anti-climactic ending that doesn’t seem to resolve much of anything. But it’s not a bad book. It’s just… Egan’s other books are extraordinary, and this one isn’t.

But I get it. I understand why Egan wrote this book, really. It's boring being the master in a certain domain. You want to try new things. And I also get that if I walk into a Barnes & Nobles, there will be ZERO Egan novels, which is disheartening, if not surprising. As I wrote in my Schild’s Ladder review, 40% of American adults are incapable of answering the math question: “Suppose a liter of cola costs US$3.15. If you buy one third of a liter of cola, how much would you pay?” By comparison, consider this paragraph from Diaspora: “This solution [of a wormhole] has positive mass. In fact, if GR [General Relativity] held true at this scale, it would just be a pair of black holes sharing a singularity. Of course, even for the heaviest elementary particles the Schwarzchild radius is far smaller than the Planck-Wheeler length, so quantum uncertainty would disrupt any potential event horizons, and perhaps even smooth away the singularity as well.” How many will be able to make sense of that?

So yeah I understand Egan’s desire to write something that veers away from hard sci-fi and toward simpler writing styles and certain cultural flavors that tend to get the attention of modern awards (and, therefore, book buyers).

However, I assume that I’m not alone in reading Egan because I’m looking for that certain grand hard sci-fi experience. So I appreciated Zendegi’s focus on Iranian culture, about which I know very little. And I appreciated Zendegi’s more intimate, human-sized tragedies. It’s just… I can get that stuff from plenty of other authors who are, frankly, better at it.

Which leaves Zendegi in a weird place, and I can’t see myself recommending it to anyone. If you're intrigued by my claims of Egan as the greatest sci-fi writer and not overly intimidated by the hard sci-fi elements, I'd direct you toward Diaspora or Permutation City. But if you're not intrigued or are intimidated, I don't think you'd like Zendegi either. So, um, yeah.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a pretty good science fiction novel about virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and political reforms, made more interesting by being set in a modernized near-future Iran. It's also a fairly hopeful novel, rather than the more dark and gritty scenarios typical of its cyberpunk forebears. The main characters are an Australian journalist who is in Iran to witness the collapse of the old regime and the shaky birth of democracy there, and an Iranian expat neurobiologist who moves back to Iran with her mother after the ayatollahs fall from power. The neurobiologist is working on neural mapping of the human brain, which she ends up applying mostly to create more lifelike NPCs for online virtual reality games, but as her research leads her closer and closer to something approaching true artificial intelligence, it raises disturbing questions about when a software program becomes "human" enough to be concerned about its rights.

Meanwhile, the journalist, who stayed in Iran because he married an Iranian woman, is now a single father raising their son when he learns that he has terminal cancer. Concerned with who will raise his son after he is gone, he turns to the neurobiologist (a distant relative of his son's mother) and asks her to create, in essence, a virtual simulacrum of himself. He understands that the technology will not actually create a true replacement for him, nor will his son believe that this online avatar is truly a digitized version of his father, but he hopes that it will at least be able to provide some guidance for his son and impart some of his sensibilities.

The story is full of interesting sci-fi concepts that are not too outlandish, a lot of human interest, and a setting that's a little different from most near-future cyber-stories. However, I can really only give Zendegi 3.5 stars because while it's well-written and carefully thought out, it didn't really hook me and at times I felt like it was just plodding along with descriptions of how neural mapping works and the introspections of a dying man and a morally compromised researcher. There isn't a lot of action in this book and the plot is no more exciting or world-changing than what I have described. So don't read this expecting any kind of sci-fi adventure or grand themes, but there is enough to make you think that if the premise sounds interesting to you, it is worth a read.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Published October 2019??? Very suspicious Mr. Author Man, very suspicious...

What happens when a global pandemic causes people to stop responding to circadian cues and leaves them unable to control their sleep schedules?

Well this undoubtedly reads much differently in April 2021 than it would have in October 2019. Since it's a short story and pointing out the parallels would be a bit spoilery, I'll tag the rest of my comments.


As someone who's always had a very hard time maintaining a consistent sleep schedule, I find the condition here extremely relatable. The ransomware angle is also amusing. The social accommodations (does that word really need double c's AND double m's) required by the pandemic are not really explored beyond the schooling much, though I think that's a big enough echo of reality to carry things.

The really interesting part to me is when the "cure" comes. One could obviously draw some vaccine hesitancy parallels here in the daughter's reluctance to take it, but that breaks down a bit for me. Especially given the extremely relatable sensation of being forced to perform out of phase that she describes. A deeper exploration of the whys of that might have been interesting but might have easily failed if attempted without a plausible biological explanation.

The only really wtf part for me was the way the idea of an internal clock was used in a (to me) overly literal sense like my internal clock says it's 10:15? Like, eh? No. Can't relate.


I've never been a big fan of short fiction as I generally need time to invest properly in at least one character to really enjoy something, but the idea here (and where Egan goes with it) resonates enough to force me to give it a 5 star rating, (my criteria being, would I reread this?) though on a just an enjoyment level I might give it a 4.

[Denis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was a few days into this book when after tensions were rising between the US and Iran and a passenger plane bound for the Ukraine (with many Canadians on board) was tragically shot down by Iranian militants. I was not aware that the novel was set in Iran. It was, however, convenient to learn more of the culture and politics of such a topical nation during the time of reading this.

This is my first work from this very talented mysterious Australian scifi author. I say mysterious as he has a rather cryptic and limited presence online. I can relate as I work at achieving the same, though for me, this is not difficult as I am not a professional artist such as this Mr. Egan. Zendegi starts rather plainly, but then blossoms into a fantastic brilliantly written and surprisingly believable near future story.

I look forward in delving into more of Egan's work.

[Jen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. Didn’t do anything for me. 2 stars because the familial relationships in this were well written.

[Myra · Rating 4 out of 5]

This review first published on Oh Just SFF.

A beautifully written short that seems disturbing and unnatural on the surface of it, but you slowly start to realize that it isn't entirely unlikely for something like circadian rhythm changes to affect the structure of society as a whole.

Focusing on the microcosm of Sam's family with the backdrop of society as whole, we get a glimpse into how it changes the life of each person. This story touches on the effect on a human level, and not just on a widespread global level.

Indeed, the interspersed narrative of Sam with his family, and the larger society and the school he teaches at, shows how individuals are dealing with it. Individuals like his daughter, Emma, who is now functioning on a different internal clock. As these things go, she is eventually forced to have medication, which keeps her up at "normal" times, but she's dull, feel heavy, and doesn't really feel like herself.

Read the rest of the review here.

[Calzean · Rating 3 out of 5]

Set in 2012, the first half of the book revolved around an Australian journalist in Iran covering what turns out to be a peaceful uprising and the replacement of the religious government. The second character was a young Irani data and AI programming expert in the US starting to explore how to turn human thought into code.
15 years later, the book moves onto its second stage. The journalist is married and living in Tehran with his Irani wife and son. The AI research-builder has returned to Tehran where she works on the latest and greatest online gaming program.
The author provides a plausible line of science and tech arguments to build his AI concepts. He also has a human interest story and the AI specialist opinion that humans shouldn't be coded. What turned me off in this one was the long passages detailing the journalist and his son playing the online virtual game.

[Corrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

For millions of years, life on Earth has taken its cues from the rising and setting of the sun, and for most of human history we’ve followed the same rhythm. But if that shared connection was broken, and we each fell under the sway of our own private clock, could we still hold our lives together? One family is about to find out.

Zeitgeber by author Greg Egan is a short story I read on Scribd, but you can also read for free on the Tor.com site https://www.tor.com/2019/09/25/zeitge...

Fascinating concept I never really considered before but the way this author wrote it, it sounds like something that could happen. Really worth reading!

Themes: circadian rhythms out of whack and how it divides people.

4 Stars

[Charles · Rating 2 out of 5]

Strong starting story with a different setting. Technically strong as is the author's wont. However, it felt half-finished when it ended.

[Sandi · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m a sucker for a free science fiction novel, especially when it’s an author I’ve heard of and the book is published by a cutting-edge publisher like Nightshade Books. Zendegi was offered free, but would have been worth paying for. If we had half stars, this would get a 3.5 rating. The first half alters between the story of an Australian reporter caught up in an Iranian revolution in 2012 and an Iranian researcher in America who is working on a project to map the human brain. It takes well over half the book for the two characters to connect. ( I found the story of Nasim’s research to be intriguing, but thought the story of Martin in the revolution was a bit long. ) The novel really kicks into gear in the second half. Set 15 years later, we find that Martin is married and living in Iran with his wife and young son. Nasim has returned to Iran and is a developer for a popular VR game, Zendigi. Of course, Martin’s little boy is addicted to the game. Martin and Nasim’s stories connect very quickly and things take unexpected turns. I don’t know how to describe the progress of the novel because it seemed both predictable and surprising at the same time. I thought Egan did a really good job of illustrating the technological research process and how scientific research in one area can end up applying to something else entirely.

[Karen ⚜Mess⚜ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Making my way through Some of the Best from Tor.com, 2019 edition I haven't had much luck, so far, with the stories. Bummer, because I have no problem finding excellent short stories from the site.

Zeitgeber is an interesting story. Started off really good, but I quickly fell asleep along with the characters. Basically, it's about a group of people whose internal clocks go out of whack. And a teacher trying to accommodate teaching time to these "runners".

Morale of the story: don't do drugs.

The End

[Ami Iida · Rating 4 out of 5]

Greg Egan's novel is usually intriguing.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wikipedia mentioned “Zendegi” on the main English page for some reason. I remember seeing it at work, and I read a few sentences before I decided it was a story I wanted to read (partially because I needed something new). I was pleased when I found it in the Kindle store for 0.99 cents. I started on it after I finished “Neuromancer”.

SUMMARY
I really don’t want to give away too much of this story…

The book follows two characters that come into contact about halfway through…

Martin Seymour is an atheist Australian journalist who specializes in the Middle East, particularly Iran. He travels there to cover the 2012 election, which quickly deteriorates into riots and revolution. He makes friends along the way and eventually falls in love with a native woman.

Nasim Golestani is an Iranian scientist living in exile in America where she has been working toward the goal of mapping the human brain (a project that has different purposes to different people, from treating mental illness to “uploading” a person as a digital conscious).

Fifteen years later, both are living in Iran and living completely different lives. They are soon united through the development of “non-sapient” artificial intelligence for a virtual reality video game world called Zendegi-ye Behtar. Driven to desperation, Martin Seymour asks Nasim to create a partial mind emulation of him before it is too late.

OVERALL: 3.6 out of 5
This novel is very good. Although it takes time to get going, I felt for the characters and related with them, the story is believable, and all the right questions are asked: where are we going? How are we going there? Why are we going? Who are we going to meet along the way?

I think the book was also good for me, as it was written by an Australian (who probably doesn’t share my own political, moral, and religious beliefs if the attitudes of the main characters are any indication), and most of the story takes place in Iran. It was a chance for me to see some other viewpoints in the world from people who don’t see America as the greatest country in all of history. My mind isn’t changed, but the outside viewpoint was still refreshing and not offensive either.

There is a moral in the story, completely summed up in the final sentence, but it’s a clever moral because it only applies to this “what if” situation. So if we ever find ourselves at the point this author has imagined (which isn’t unrealistic by any means), then it’s a moral people might want to think long and hard about.

So while I haven’t heard of Greg Egan before this, I believe I’ll be reading more of his work in the future.

SPECIAL NOTE: This book had serious competition. I played through Mass Effect 3 while reading this and the controversial ending of the game had me emotionally ruined for about a week. I think it may have set me up to be more sympathetic toward the ending of this book though.


RATINGS BY CATEGORY
CHARACTERS: 4 out of 5
The writer doesn’t paint a perfect portrait of a character in a single sentence, and there is no moment when I stopped and said “I really know these people”, but through a fair amount of material the reader is able to get to know them. They feel real, and their motivations make sense. Martin’s relationships with his friends and his son are particularly strong.

If I had a complaint, it would be that all of the main characters seem to share identical political, religious, and moral values. Fortunately this isn’t an important issue in the story actually.

My Cast
Martin Seymour Russell Crowe
Nasim Golestani Jane Seymour (Persian edition)

PACE: 3 out of 5
I wouldn’t say there is a lot of “fluff” in this book, or meaningless passages that don’t serve the story but help the word count, but there is a lot of time spent getting to know the characters. It is worth it by the end of the book, but sometimes I wondered if the writer was wasting my time. Fortunately things do move pretty quickly.

STORY: 4 out of 5
This isn’t an action story. “Zendegi” is about humanity, where we’re going, and why we’re going there. It’s not a novel that advertises what the moral is going to be in the first three chapters though. In fact, the entire first section (second section begins 33% of the way through the book) has very little to do with the actual story… but it all works.

The author dives into the concept of “mind emulation”, or uploading a biological brain into a computer system and emulating it. Unlike the “Transhuman Space” roleplaying setting (which I adore) where such technologies have been around for decades, “Zendegi” approaches the question as a frontier, where religious zealots, would-be-immortals, and the rank and file software engineers are just trying to make sense of how, why, and when. It all ties into the story of a dying man who doesn’t want to leave his young son without a good mentor in life.

DIALOGUE: 3 out of 5
For a book that isn’t about the action, there isn’t too much dialogue. A lot of the book is spent with a character’s internal thoughts or memories. The dialogue is well written, though there is so much Farsi (or maybe Arabic at some points), sometimes translated and sometimes not, that I wasn’t always sure what the characters were saying.

I was also surprised that the story starts and stays clean for the first half or so, and then there is suddenly some profanity sprinkled into things. I’m no stranger to that, but it could throw off other readers who might assume they are reading a “safe” book.

STYLE/TECHNICAL EXECUTION: 4 out of 5
“Zendegi” has a perfect layout, in my opinion, where the two main characters trade off chapters regularly. When they interact, the viewpoint doesn’t skip between them at all. The writing is otherwise always clear and easy to understand.

[Oscar · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quizás ’Zendegi’ sea el libro más asequible dentro de la bibliografía de Greg Egan, el famoso autor de ciencia ficción hard. Y digo asequible, que no simple, ya que aunque el peso de terminología científica es mucho menor en esta obra, las ideas que maneja son de gran calado. Egan deja esta vez las grandes ideas especulativas para centrarse en una historia más de ámbito social y ético, donde priman las experiencias y relaciones de los protagonistas. Parece que esta vez la ciencia ficción es una herramienta que utiliza Egan como trasfondo de lo que realmente nos quiere contar, que no es otra cosa que lo que estaría dispuesto a hacer un padre por amor a su hijo.

Egan sitúa ’Zendegi’ (palabra que significa vida en persa) en Irán, en un futuro cercano. La primera parte de la novela es una carta de presentación de los personajes y de sus vidas, donde se nos dan a conocer los dos hilos narrativos de la trama, así como los dos personajes que los sustentan: Martin Seymour, un periodista australiano destinado a cubrir las elecciones iraníes, y que se ve inmerso en medio de los acontecimientos posteriores; y Nasim Golestani, una exiliada iraní en Estados Unidos, dedicada a trabajar en un proyecto que intenta mapear el cerebro humano. Ya en la segunda parte, es donde empieza la historia en sí, y donde entra en juego Zendegi, un espacio de realidad virtual.

La novela de Greg Egan no es de acción, todo lo contrario, tiene un transcurrir pausado y tranquilo, donde sabemos de las vidas de los personajes, así como de sus logros y fracasos, que junto a los avances tecnológicos, sirven de reflexión sobre la familia, la mortalidad, los cambios sociales, etc. Se plantea también el enfrentamiento, el debate moral y ético, entre las posibilidades que nos ofrece la ciencia para emular duplicados de cerebros, de personas, y los derechos que éstos deberían tener, que me ha parecido los más interesante de la novela.

’Zendegi’ no es que me haya disgustado, pero tampoco me ha entusiasmado en exceso. Resulta una buena reflexión de un futuro cercano, pero está lejos de las ideas y especulaciones científicas a que nos tiene habituados Greg Egan en otras obras suyas, como ‘Axiomático’, ‘Cuarentena’ o ‘Diáspora’. Realmente, espero otro tipo de historias por parte de Greg Egan.

[Rosemary Standeven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Six-year-old Emma is not sleeping when she should. Her whole body-clock is way out of kilter, and nothing her parents can do will alter it. My initial impression was – spoilt brat! Her parents become increasingly worried, but hoping that

“All they had to do was gently pull her back in synch with the rest of the world”

Soon they discover, it is not just Emma, but hundreds of thousands of people – of all ages and all backgrounds, world-wide – are suffering from the same disorder. There is no identifiable cause, and no way of stopping it. The ‘free-runners’, as they become known, have their own body-clocks, and cannot readjust to normality. As Emma’s father, Sam, explains:

“The whole problem for free-runners is that none of those cues affect them! It’s no different from being blind to sunlight – except you’re also blind to temperature, food, exercise, social interaction, and every jet-lag pill ever invented.”

Society adjusts temporarily to the free-runners, but then a group called ‘The Time Thieves’ claims responsibility for the plague – and demands one trillion dollars for the cure.

A ‘cure’ is eventually designed – but will it really help? Emma (now nine-years-old) is unconvinced:

“I already have the sun inside me. The one you see up in the sky doesn’t count”
This story is quite far-fetched, but it does bring up the question of how far you should push people to confirm to normal conventions? Is it always really in their interests? Or yours?

[Kam Yung Soh · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting tale by Greg Egan. Unlike the usual 'Hard SF' stories he has written in the past, this one has little that is actual Hard SF, apart from the biology that forms the premise of the story. Instead, the story concentrates on the actions and emotions of the characters as their inner clocks get out of sync with that of the sun and with each other.

The story starts off with their daughter unexpectedly waking up alert in the middle of the night. Then other people around the world also start having active hours out of sync with those of other 'normal' people (the daylight hours). As the world is forced to adjust to the new situation, with occasional disasters caused by people failing to be alert during the 'usual' hours, it becomes clear that something biological has happened.

The family struggles to adjust but then their new routine is thrown into more turmoil as a 'cure' is touted to restore the waking hours of those affected back in sync with the sun. By then, their daughter (and some of her friends) have grown used to their new active hours and resist being forced to return to their old routine hours. But in the midst of the family conflict over the cure, they will bond together to decide what to do with the cure and how important their daughter is to them.

[Netanella · Rating 3 out of 5]

I always enjoy a story more when I learn something unexpected from it, beyond the mere enjoyment of the fiction piece. A new word, a scientific principle, a creature from folklore. So Egan's latest short on Tor.com, "Zeitgeber," gave me the pleasure of a new German word, and the psychological concept of free running.

zeitgeber - German "time-giver," an external or environmental cue that entrains, or synchronizes, an organism's biological rhythms, usually naturally occurring and serving to entrain to the Earth's 24-hour light/dark and 12-month cycles.

free running - Free running rhythm refers to the circadian rhythm assumed by an individual when their sleep is not guided by external cues.

A school teacher's young daughter starts to keep late hours, awake half the night and asleep half the day. And over the course of the next two years, entire sections of the country experience the same phenomenon, with various degrees of adaptability. I enjoy Egan's writing style, and the character of the teacher, but I wasn't really sold on the story.

[Gendou · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is the first thing from Greg Egan that's ever disappointed me. The premise isn't very clever. The story doesn't go anywhere. I was expecting a lot more. Maybe that was my problem. There was an arc but I was expecting a twist ending.

[Bart · Rating 3 out of 5]

(...)

Aside from the science, Egan shows himself a keen observer of humanity. Zendegi is also a book about bias, and Egan is, via Martin Seymour, an honest, soul searching commentator on these matters, with a sensibility for diversity and bigotry seeped in respect for what it means to be human, never pointing fingers, but not flinching away from judgement either. Even though I only mention it at the very end of this review, this bias isn’t some trivial matter: it is at the heart of the entire narrative.

Definitely recommended for Egan fans, and because it is very accessible without being superficial, it’s also recommended as an introduction to his work

Full review on Weighing A Pig Doesn't Fatten It

[Mark Richard · Rating 1 out of 5]

>>>>>>>>>I must have looked at the COVER three or four times to check that the book inside hadnt got mixed up with a book about IRANIAN politics and a very annoying Aussie bloke and his LP collection... I'm sure the Politics of Iran are a joy to read about.... but when you were hoping for a read about some crazy MATRIX type world where regular people can go and live it sounded great.... if you get passed the first 120 pages then maybe it will suddenly become GREAT but I could think of many more wonderful things to occupy myself with ..... like watching one of those Quiz Shows for the mentally insane.....

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Greg Egan's foray into near-future science fiction feels like a departure of sorts; his gaze has been focused on much farther horizons of late. But I think this change of pace has turned out to be a really good thing; Zendegi is a taut, plausible future history which, even if it does turn out to be overtaken by events, still partakes of the best of hard sf—rigorous extrapolation from what is known into the dizzying ramifications of what-if.

Martin Seymour is a journalist who goes to Iran just before a tipping point is reached... a scandal that in many countries would be relatively minor (a male politician is caught with a gorgeous transvestite in a way that makes a mockery of official denials) becomes a referendum on the nation's repressive religious leadership, and to a liberalization of the country, in a way that feels totally believable. When we meet him, Martin comes across as a fairly shallow character, obsessing over transferring his vinyl LP collection to electronic format (it turns out that his musical taste is, well, let's just say that we'd have a lot of common areas to talk about, he and I). But he, and Zendegi, get deeper. Martin ends up staying in Iran, at first involuntarily but then by choice. He marries Mahnoosh, runs a bookstore, and has a son named Javeed.

Parallel to this runs the story of an expatriate Iranian named Nasim Golestani, whose pioneering work with non-destructively mapping minds leads to her involvement in Zendegi, a virtual reality company with a worldwide network of full-immersion arcades and a consuming need for more realistic non-player characters. She's able to build on her earlier work to create Proxies for Zendegi, snapshots of mental processes which aren't truly sentient but which do convincingly emulate sentience... in a way, these are really pieces of minds. Not such a far-fetched view, given the notion (as expressed grippingly in Tor Nørretranders' The User Illusion) that our consciousnesses are made up of a consensus of often-conflicting agents, rather than being a single unitary "I".

Nasim's success becomes even more significant when Martin finds out he's closer to dying than he ever thought he was. He wants Nasim to make a Proxy more advanced and complete than anything she's ever done... a Proxy of him, to guide Javeed in his absence. This is an order of magnitude more complex than anything Nasim's done so far; and if she can do it at all, she's not sure she should.

Egan's book is a sincere, humanistic tale with complex, believable characters, whose motivations are honest and valid even when they conflict. The science in the book is as rigorous as he could make it. The politics are plausible—even if events in Iran and elsewhere don't turn out anything like these, they could. And, Egan eventually gets into some deep waters philosophically, musing on the meaning of mind and considering the ethics of creating things like minds and then using them either for fun or profit—even if the things themselves don't seem to mind. Just how human does something have to become before we begin treating it as something worthy of its own autonomy? Considering how often humans treat other humans as chattel, it's not at all surprising that misgivings about Proxies receive short shrift among the entities that stand to profit from their use. What is surprising, though, is where Egan's considerations take him; it's a much more nuanced position than I would've expected.

Zendegi is something of a return to form for Egan, or at least so it seems to me, a reminder of why I started reading his novels in the first place. In venturing back into the territory of a Bruce Sterling or Ian McDonald, Greg Egan has crafted a tale worth reading—on several levels.

[Alejandro · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5* Egan me alucina en sus relatos.Zendegi es muy buena cuando hace incapie en desarrollar ideas pero tiene momentos muy pesados.Las cien primeras páginas las utiliza Egan para ponerte en contexto y es una barrera que hay que superar para llegar a ver algunas de las buenas ideas que desarrolla.

[Tomislav · Rating 5 out of 5]

Australian SF writer Greg Egan is known especially as a hardsf writer, where the science/technology is meant to be realistically speculative. I have found much of his work to be more true to the concepts than to the characters, and of course that limits his appeal beyond a select subset of SF readers. However, this is a singular novel in his bibliography, in which the plot is driven by the characters, even while the science/technology maintains it in the hardsf category. Sort of the best of both worlds.

The setting is singular as well. The novel was written in 2010, and set in its beginning in 2012 Iran during a slow-building uprising against the theocracy. Australian journalist Martin Seymour is covering events, and becomes involved with the events leading up to the change of government. There is a very realistic feel to these events as it is not some sort of fantasy conversion to western values, but more a tipping of which group is in charge. Egan himself traveled from Australia to Iran, at some personal risk, to research the culture and circumstances of contemporary Iran. The other main character is Iranian scientist Nasim Golestani, a political exile in the US, working on the Human Connectome Project (HCP). I understood HCP to be an attempt to build an exact model of a human brain at the level of individual neurons, somewhat akin to the Human Genome Project, but with a significantly larger dataset size.

The second setting is 15 years later, in the future Iran that has resulted. Both Martin and Nasim now reside permanently in Iran, in somewhat changed circumstances. It is enjoyable to discover through reading what has happenend in each of their lives during the intervening years, so I will not spoil it with plot synopsis.

I was fascinated to read Egan making extensive use of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) for purposes of identifying brain activation maps of individuals in order to impress something of their personalities into the HCP data set, to create more realistic character proxies in the Zendegi virtual reality space. He calls the process "side-loading". But as a biomedical engineer working in MRI, I did have an issue here. fMRI does not measure neuron activity directly, but rather increased blood oxygenation in the vicinity of activated neurons. Egan shows that he does understand this, but the problem to me is a matter of scale. The resolution of MRI is on the order of millimeters, and one cubic millimeter contains billions of neurons. I just do not see how the detail necessary to impart specific soccer skills or specific parenting values could be captured. Increasing the power of the scanner by "an order of magnitude" would not really help either, as the blood oxygenation takes place all over an area up to 1 or 2 millimeters from the activation anyway. Be that as it may, by that point, I was more interested in the fate of the characters and the nature of their experience.

Just near the ending are some unexpected plot twists. Others may find them abrupt, but I think some of the reversals are worthy of consideration in the reader's time immediately after finishing.

[Judy & Marianne from Long and Short Reviews · Rating 3 out of 5]

How do you stop a disease that has no known cure?

The premise of this tale grabbed my attention immediately. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to suddenly have one’s circadian rhythm change without warning and with no explanation of why it was happening. It was a problem that was ordinary enough for me to imagine myself in these character’s shoes while also mysterious enough to create some memorable plot twists. This is one of my favorite types of science fiction, and I couldn’t wait to find out what was causing these issues.

There were a few plot holes that I wish had been better explained. They had to do with how humanity reacted to the sleep cycles of some people changing so rapidly and permanently. Since this story unfolded over multiple years, I would have expected people to adjust to these changes better than they appeared to. It would have been helpful to have some more clues about why this didn’t happen for them.

With that being said, the ending was well done. It was subtly hinted at earlier on in the storyline, so seeing it play out the way I thought it might made me smile. I also appreciated the fact that the author gave his audience so much freedom in coming up with our own theories about what caused this illness and what might happen to the characters in the future. There was room for a sequel, but I was also pretty satisfied with what had already been shared with the readers.

If you’ve ever had trouble with your sleep cycle, Zeitgeber might be right up your alley.